


The Narrator (and the flying car!)

by Shadowscast_meta (Shadowscast)



Series: Musings and Speculations about The Umbrella Academy [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:20:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26537215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowscast/pseuds/Shadowscast_meta
Summary: Is the narrator of The Umbrella Academy a character?(This work is non-fiction.  Just a little rambling essay in which I share some stray thoughts that I had about canon!)
Series: Musings and Speculations about The Umbrella Academy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1929661
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	The Narrator (and the flying car!)

A member of my family posed an interesting question over dinner the other night: Is the narrator of The Umbrella Academy a character?

I hadn't even remembered that there _was_ a narrator until I re-watched the very start of season 2 a few days ago (I was reviewing how one of the characters' powers worked).

But yes, seasons 1 and 2 are each introduced by the voice of a narrator. As far as I can remember, those are the only times that the narrator is heard.

And, well, maybe the narrator is just a narrator. This show breaks its internal reality for stylistic reasons in various places—with all those episode-opening umbrella appearances, for instance.

But what if the narrator is a character? Who might they be, and what is their role, and how do they know what they know?

I went back to S1 E1 and S2 E1 and took note of the narrator's lines.

At the start of S1 E1:

> On the twelfth hour of the 1st day of October, 1989, 43 women around the world gave birth. This was unusual only in the fact that none of these women had been pregnant when the day first began.
> 
> Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire and adventurer, resolved to locate and adopt as many of the children as possible.
> 
> [Title card: HE GOT SEVEN OF THEM.]

And at the start of S2 E1:

> On April the 1st, 2019, the Earth was destroyed in a cataclysmic event. Billions of people were wiped out in a matter of minutes. Ironically, the six survivors of the apocalypse were the very siblings who brought it on.

So the narrator, if they are a character in the universe, is certainly well-informed. And standing somewhat out of time, one assumes, if they can know the details of the April 1st apocalypse while not being dead from it.

I'm saying "they" but it's a male voice, adult, with a British accent (I think; I'm not great at recognizing accents). I checked the IMDB credits for both opening episodes, and the narrator isn't credited, so no clues there.

So who might the narrator be?

First of all: probably not God. We've met God. God was a little girl.

Not that God couldn't probably take on whatever form and use whatever voice they wanted to, but so far, canonically, God appears as a little girl. So I'm ruling out God as the narrator.

My family member mentioned that they'd briefly thought that the narrator might be Reggie Hargreeves himself (talking about himself in the third person? well, why not?) but we listened carefully and decided it's not his voice.

So I don't think that the narrator could be anybody we've specifically met, but there are a couple of possibilities that I see:

Maybe the narrator is somebody from the Commission. They have an outside perspective on the timeline, and could probably gather information about the 43 mysterious births, Reginald Hargreeve's actions, and the moon apocalypse.

Or, maybe the narrator is someone from Reggie's home planet. We still know pretty much nothing about that whole thing. Do they have anything to do with the 43 births? They could've watched the moon blow up from space, though I don't know how they would have known about the Hargreeve siblings' involvement.

Anyway ... idle speculation, as I said. Probably the narrator is just a narrator, outside of the universe of the story entirely!

PS: While re-watching the start of S1 E1 for this post, I spotted something I'd either never noticed before or had forgotten: just as the narrator says "Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire and adventurer," there's a shot of a _flying car_ zipping over the Moscow night skyline. Like, seriously: it looks like a Volvo with wings. Did anybody else notice that? Is that Reggie's flying car? Is that a thing in canon? Why did it never show up again? Did Diego and Klaus borrow the flying car when they were teenagers and fly it into the Whomping Willow? Has anybody written a fic about this? Should I? (Just kidding. I really don't think I could write that.)

**Author's Note:**

> Comments on this work, or any work in this series, are absolutely welcome. I would be thrilled to hear other people's thoughts on any of these topics! You could even comment on _other_ people's comments, if you see something you'd like to respond to. I am hungry for Umbrella Academy discussion—maybe we can have some here!
> 
> (FYI, I'm not on tumblr or twitter or pretty much anywhere the cool kids go. I am on [Dreamwidth](https://shadowscast.dreamwidth.org/tag/umbrella+academy), though, and all of these essays started out as posts over there. Stop by and say 'hi' if you'd like!)


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